Former Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada has criticized the Xbox Series S. According to Inven Global, Harada was talking during a panel at the Console Game Developers Conference 2026 in South Korea alongside a number of other industry professionals, including former Sony president Shuhei Yoshida as the moderator, and Shift Up CTO DongKi Lee, Too Kyo Games CEO Kazutaka Kodaka, CD Projekt RED associate game director Paweł Sasko, and Ludeon Studios CEO Tynan Sylvester as fellow panelists.
Discussing the subject of developing games for consoles, Harada said that he wished that “hardware like Xbox Series S wouldn’t be released.” Noting that a senior Xbox official was also in attendance, Harada then asked Sasko whether he was “upset inside” due to the weaker console. After a laugh, Sasko responded by saying, “It constantly throws challenges at us and forces us to optimize our code very cleanly.”
Harada went on to criticize the console, asking Sasko if he “just used a very polite and elegant way to say ‘Xbox Series S sucks,’ right?” Among his biggest complaints about the console is the fact that it is similar to the Xbox Series X, but has several constraints like low memory, leading to performance issues that the development teams then have to optimize for. He doesn’t have similar issues with the Nintendo Switch 2 since it is a distinct platform.
“Low memory is an issue, but the hardest part is that it’s a device so similar to Series X while having awkwardly lower performance. When porting to Switch 2, developers can shift their mindset to ‘Switch 2 is a distinct device for Nintendo fans!’ But with Xbox, after delivering your absolute best output, it feels like having to do extra work for a slightly weaker child.
“Furthermore, in markets like the US, there are more Series S users than Series X users, so we can’t just cut corners. Yet after launch, Series S users direct their complaints at us developers rather than Microsoft, asking ‘Why is texture resolution lower only on Series S?’”
Offering some defense of the Xbox Series S, Sasko pointed out that developers working hard to optimize for the console has led to every other platform also benefiting from performance boosts. Bringing up Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, he noted that the work done on its Nintendo Switch 2 port was then applied to all other versions of the game “to great effect”.
“Director Paweł packaged Series S so gracefully that the Microsoft representative in the audience keeps nodding along,” responded Harada. “I’m worried they’ll feel reassured and release a successor like ‘Helix S’ for the next-gen Xbox as well (laughs).”
Harada isn’t the only person from the games industry to have faced issues with the Xbox Series S. Larian famously had to delay the Xbox port of Baldur’s Gate 3 since the team wanted to ensure that the platform didn’t miss out on features like split-screen multiplayer. However, due to Microsoft’s mandate that the Xbox Series X and Series S versions of games should have feature parity, the studio couldn’t simply skip including local multiplayer for the Xbox Series S version.
